The next directorial effort from James Franco will be an adaption of the John Steinbeck novel In Dubious Battle, and he has assembled a big-name cast: Selena Gomez, Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Bryan Cranston and Danny McBride. The film will shoot in March, and we have a few more details on Franco’s In Dubious Battle film adaptation below. Read More »

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There’s nothing quite like a death in the family to bring the living members of the family back together. Or at least that seems to be a running theme at the movies this year, between Are You Here, This Is Where I Leave You, and now the new The Judge trailer.

Robert Downey Jr. leads the drama as hotshot attorney Hank Palmer, who returns to his childhood home after the death of his mother. When he gets home, he discovers that his estranged father (Robert Duvall), an esteemed judge, has been accused of murder. Watch The Judge trailer after the jump.

Thought Tony Stark had daddy issues? At least Howard Stark isn’t around to bother him anymore. That’s sadly not the case for Robert Downey Jr. in The Judge, the new drama by David Dobkin.

Downey plays a Chicago defense attorney who returns home for his mom’s funeral, and then sticks around to defend his dad (Robert Duvall) in a murder trial. That’d be a tough situation in the best of cases, but it’s complicated further by the old hostility between father and son. Check out The Judge first-look image after the jump.

In A Night in Old Mexico there’s a mini-Lonesome Dove reunion of sorts, as the film has Robert Duvall working with a script by Lonesome Dove scribe William T. Wittliff. This is a very different sort of project, however. Duvall plays an old rancher who has lost his land, and heads down to Mexico for one last drunken night out with his estranged grandson. But they give a ride to some bad men en route, and and up with the money those guys were carrying. It’s a lot of money, and people with guns want to get it back. Naturally, that gives Duvall a chance to show his tough old leathery side. Check out the A Night in Old Mexico trailer below. Read More »

Some months ago, before shooting his latest film Jayne Mansfield’s Car, Billy Bob Thornton said that there just aren’t many movies being made lately that are really of interest to him. And indeed, the first trailer for his latest, which stars Thornton, Robert Duvall, John Hurt, Frances O’Connor, Ray Stevenson, Robert Patrick, and what looks like a draft-dodging Kevin Bacon, makes the film look like a pretty controlled, even old-fashioned family drama the likes of which we don’t often see.

That’s not a bad thing, at least as an absolute, though in this particular case the film doesn’t look like the liveliest thing around. But there are good performance moments in this trailer, which arrives thanks to a DVD release that hits there early next year. Thornton’s ’60s-set drama is rooted in the South and revolves around a family reunited for a funeral; see some of what he put together, below. Read More »

The latest actor to join Christian Bale in Scott Cooper‘s Out of the Furnace is likely to be Zoe Saldana. She’s in early talks for the film that Cooper is rewriting (based on Brad Ingelsby‘s The Low Dweller script) and will direct as his follow-up to Crazy Heart.

Bale will be an ex-con who is determined to avenge the death of his younger brother after being released from prison. Various actors have been mentioned as possible choices for the brother (Casey Affleck, Garrett Hedlund, Taylor Kitsch and Channing Tatum) and Robert Duvall is nearly set to play the main character’s helpful uncle, while Viggo Mortensen could end up being the villain.

Out of the Furnace could shoot this spring if the cast comes together and Relativity gives it the final green light. As we’ve heard before, that green light will primarily be based on the finalization of a deal with Bale, which hasn’t yet happened. [Variety]

After the break, a film called The Occult signs Rufus Sewell and Anne Heche, and Julianna Margulies joines Al Pacino in the comedic action film Stand Up Guys. Read More »

Is there any film project more tenacious than Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote? The film just cannot be, er, killed, no matter what happens. Casting problems? It will overcome. Funding and script issues? This movie shrugs them off. Acts of God aren’t even enough.

The film first came together in 2000, with Gilliam directing Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort in the lead roles. The production was beset by disastrous weather, interruption from planes, and injury to Rochefort. The production was scrapped, inspiring the documentary Lost in La Mancha.

The film was revived in 2009 with a rewritten script and possible new casting, with Robert Duvallreplacing Rochefort and Ewan McGregoreventually taking Depp’s role. But financing for that version dried up and the project went dormant again. Now the film’s screenwriter, Tony Grisoni, says the film is potentially happening once more. Read More »

Last year, before The Dark Knight Rises had fully shot, there was a lot of speculation about what Christian Bale would do after his tenure as Batman ended. Turns out he planned a couple films with Terrence Malick, but another project that was mentioned as a possible one for Bale has reared its head once more.

We’d heard that Scott Cooper, who directed Crazy Heart, was courting Bale last year to star in The Low Dweller, a revenge drama that Brad Ingelsby wrote and Cooper had latched on to as director. Cooper was also rewriting, and the project got a new title: Out of the Furnace. Bale had fallen away from the project late last year, but now he’s back in talks to take the lead role. Read More »

Christopher McQuarrie‘s adaptation of Lee Child‘s thriller novel One Shot is moving forward with Tom Cruise in the lead role of hulking ex-military cop Jack Reacher, who is drawn into a strange plot involving sniper shootings in a mid-size town.

To say that fans have been unenthusiastic about that casting choice is an understatement. A recent re-read of the novel gave me a good idea of how the character will be adapted to suit Cruise, and so I’m ready to see what McQuarrie is going to offer. But I’ve had many conversations with others who aren’t so sure. Cruise seems quite aware of that uncertainty, as he talks publicly about his role in the film. Read More »